Sean Michael Kerner

Python is pressing ahead with its 3.x series of releases, delivering Python 3.2 to the community, with a heavy focus on multithreading and concurrency. “From our perspective, Python 3.2’s support for writing multithreaded applications, points to better parallelism and wider adoption for Python in the financial and scientific sectors,” said Diane Mueller, director of enterprise […]

In recent years, software appliances have become increasingly popular as a way for enterprises to deploy applications. And Novell, with its SUSE Studio Linux software appliance technology, s among the leading technology vendors in the software appliance market. Thanks to a new partnership with IBM, the process of building Big Blue’s DB2 database into a […]

Apple’s Mac OS X operating system has generally fared well in steering clear of security vulnerabilities. But researchers as security vendor Sophos have identified what they believe to be a chink in the armor, namely a remote access Trojan (RAT) that could be exploited to send commands to an infected machine, or produce a fake […]

From the ‘Release Timing‘ files: The first complete major Linux distribution to integrate LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice.org is…. openSUSE 11.4 The Novell led openSUSE Linux distribution is out this week with RC2 of openSUSE 11.4 and in my view it will be among the first big Linux distros that has moved to LibreOffice in a […]

The popularity of Adobe’s multimedia Flash software also makes it a popular target for hackers intent on spreading malware. Adobe is diligent about issuing patches as security issues surface, but how do you scan a Flash application to see if it’s a security risk? Security vendor Rapid7 says the latest update of its NeXpose vulnerability […]

From the “Modern Web Browser‘ files: Mozilla is out now with Firefox 4 Beta 12 and it fixes a very, very, very long list of bugs. By my count it fixes at least 659 identified bugs (count ’em yourself if you want..). The improvements are also non-trivial and deal with stability and performance across the […]

ZFS emerged as an outgrowth of the Sun’s Open Solaris, but now that Oracle has spiked that technology after the Sun acquisition, the open source filesystem lives on. FreeBSD is expanding its support for ZFS with its latest release, version 8.2, which offers numerous improvements and patches for bugs in the 8.1 release. “FreeBSD 8 […]

From the ‘Twitter Tall Tales’ files: There are a lot of ‘touchy’ issues in the open source world – none are perhaps more controversial than those involving money. One such case is the recent attempt by Ubuntu to redirect affiliate dollars away from the GNOME project and its Banshee media player – to Ubuntu’s own […]

Meraki is looking to ramp up the performance of its networking offering while at the same time tightening up security. This week, Meraki updated both its hardware and software, and added network access control (NAC) technology to shield enterprise IT assets from security threats, a feature that customers have been asking for, though one that […]

Networking vendor Meraki is updating both its software and hardware this week expanding security and performance. Meraki develops cloud managed network routers and Wi-Fi access points. On the software side, Meraki’s hardware is based on a hardened Linux operating system at its core. As part of the new update, Network Access Control (“NAC“) is being […]

Cisco tried to make a go of it. It really did. But after more than a year of development and substantial investment, the networking giant has decided to cancel its hosted email offering, a cloud-based service powered by Linux and based around the technology acquired through the 2008 purchase of PostPath. “The product has been […]

After weeks of speculation, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) today officially announced an updated lineup of MacBook Pro notebooks including Intel’s Thunderbolt I/O, technology. The new MacBooks aren’t the only new release from Apple today. Mac OS X Lion, the next generation of Apple’s operating system, is now available as a developer preview as well. The release […]